Havre searching for fix to critical water infrastructure needs

The City of Havre may be closing in on an infrastructure crisis in the next few years that could cost city residents a lot of money and peace of mind unless serious investment by the town’s government and citizenry are made to avert it.

Havre Public Works Director Trevor Mork, who took the position earlier this year, said much of the city’s water infrastructure requires updates and replacements before the city hooks into the North Central Montana Regional Water Authority, possibly in the next four years, or the economic fallout could be significant.

For many years Havre has been among many cities and areas scheduled to hook into the North Central Montana Regional Water Authority, a more-than-two-decades-long project designed to supply affordable water throughout this area of Montana.

The regional water system was part of Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation’s water compact, to provide water to residents on the reservation, and, as is typical with these type of systems in the West, was expanded to provide water to a number of rural areas off-reservation as well.

Water treated at a plant, now under construction, will be used in systems in Chouteau, Hill, Liberty, Pondera, Teton, Glacier and Toole counties as well as Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation.

This is a project the city has been universally supportive of after agreeing to join the water authority in 2007, but, Mork said, since then the city hasn’t been able to replace much of its aging water infrastructure and, as the project gets closer to completion, the specifics of the city’s contract with the water authority could see residents paying for repairs and wasted water when there’s a main break.

Mork said, the cost of water production and distribution is not directly paid for by citizens if a break occurs within the city limits beyond the rate paid by property taxes, meaning the citizens of Havre do not pay for the “meter running” at the water treatment plant.

But when the city hooks into the water authority the water lost during a main break will be billed to users or the city.

The city has contracted for 3.5 million gallons of water delivered a year whether that amount of usage is met or not and any usage beyond that is to be paid by the gallon at a rate determined by the authority.

Mork said the city and the water authority are still negotiating the cost of that water, but if substantial improvements aren’t made to the city’s water system before they hook into the authority it’s going to cost a tremendous amount of money long term, with citizens now responsible for paying the price for water main breaks.

He said the city also still uses a lot of cast iron pipes which contain manganese, a mineral shown to be dangerous to humans that can leach into the water.

The city prevents contamination by treating the water with chlorine, which neutralizes the manganese, preventing any harm to the people using it.

However, he said, the water authority treats its water using chloramine, which, while an otherwise safe and effective disinfectant, activates manganese instead of neutralizing it.

Chloramine stays in the water longer and produces lower levels of disinfectant byproducts, which is why it is typically used in long-distance systems.

“Chloramines provide longer-lasting disinfection as the water moves through pipes to consumers,” the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency website says.

It also is used by a number of major cities in the United States including Washington, D.C., Denver, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Sioux Falls, S.D.

Because of its impact on manganese, Mork said, the city of Havre, and, by extension, its residents, will end up footing the bill for an extra layer of treatment unless the pipes are replaced.

To pay for all new pipes, he said, would take an average of $570 per year from each property owner over 20 years. In 2013 that number was an average of $424 per property owner for 20 years, and the longer they wait the higher that number will likely get.

Mork said this is a huge investment, but between the cost of additional water treatment and the frequent water breaks that result from the city’s aging infrastructure, it’s going to cost the government and community a lot more long term if this problem isn’t fixed before hooking into the water authority.

In reality, he said, this is an investment the city should be making anyway, the water authority has just made the problems with the city’s water system more apparent, especially when it comes to the cast iron pipes.

“In 15 years no changes had been made to the system to prepare for this North Central Regional Water,” he said. “... Those cast iron pipes have lived their life and then some.”

He said a lot of changes have happened in the decades since the lines were put in, with some areas having gone from farmland to residential areas with little effort or investment put in to keep the infrastructure in line with those changes.

He said there was a valiant effort by the people of Havre in the wake of the Great Depression to address a lot of this, but in the generations since then enthusiasm to invest in infrastructure has decreased significantly and the consequences of that are being seen now.

Consequences of aging infrastructure

Even without the issue of the water authority, Havre has been seeing complications arising from its aging infrastructure as the years go on, and not just in the form of frequent water breaks.

A few months ago the city experienced an extremely strong rainstorm that saw business in the downtown area basements flooded, followed shortly by a sewage back up that left many in the area angry with the city.

Mork said that the incident was something of a perfect storm, a result of the outdated infrastructure, an unusually powerful rainstorm and human error.

He said the foundational infrastructure of that area were largely laid down in 1906, old even by the city of Havre’s standards, and back then it was common practice to design gutters to run into the sanitary sewer system, which is not done today for a number of practical and environmental reasons.

He said sanitary sewer water is treated, whereas stormwater is just collected and discharged into the Milk River, and consequently the two systems are kept separate and built very differently.

“A lot has changed in that 100 to 120 years,” he said. “That practice is actually against agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, (Montana) Department of Environmental Quality (standards), just due to how each of the two systems are handled and treated.”

Mork said sanitary sewer systems are not designed to handle the volume that a storm water system is and this, combined with the construction of the buildings not being conducive to effectively diverting storm water, put the system in the area in a precarious position.

As their basements started to flood some of the businesses started pumping the water into the sanitary sewer instead of the storm system, which ended making the problem worse, eventually leading to the sewage backup.

“They were not only recycling their problem, but compounding it,” he said.

Mork said when he spoke to the business owners they either mixed up the drains or didn’t understand the systems, a problem the city and business owners have since rectified, hopefully preventing something like this from happening again.

He said the business owners were interested in ways to improve their local systems and if they follow through an incident like this shouldn’t happen again, and the city is happy to help advise them on how best to do that.

He said a recent backup at Northern Montana Health Care around the same time was unrelated, but still caused by infrastructure problems.

Mork said he that when the hospital was built the sewer line was built with a huge design flaw.

“The sewer service line to the sewer main for the hospital is flat, painfully flat,” he said.

He said sewer lines are intentionally built at an angle that allows gravity to prevent them from backing up when they start getting full, but the fact that this one is flat made it much easier for the backup to occur.

This incident, he said, involved that hospitals produce a lot of food, a lot of grease and, increasingly, use a lot of disposable medical devices that don’t degrade easily.

This, combined with the design flaw and the fact lines like this just aren’t built for high pressure can lead to incidents like this.

Mork said the hospital was aware of that flaw and since the backup has proposed possible remedies to the problem, which the city is happy about.

Possible solutions

Despite the severity of the city’s infrastructure situation with the water authority, Mork said, it is very possible for the city to avoid these impending issues, but it will take an investment not just by the city, but by the public.

“We can do it,” he said, “It’s been done before.”

Mork said to understand the problem people need to understand how the city’s government works when it comes to infrastructure and the relationship and responsibilities of the city’s government vs. the city as a community of people.

He said the city’s government is legally responsible for maintaining the safety and operability of its basic services, including the roads and water systems underneath them, and they allocate their resources accordingly.

However, he said, making improvements to these systems falls largely on the community and the city cannot make such a massive investment in infrastructure without the permission of the voters to raise taxes to pay for it.

He used the analogy of buying a car to explain the relationship.

Sellers don’t tell the buyers what they should get, he said, they ask the buyer about their budget and what they’re looking for, and when discussing infrastructure improvements it’s a very similar situation.

Mork said the city has tried multiple times over the years to increase taxes, but they are voted down when elections come around, so they instead focus their efforts on keeping services as operable as possible with the money they have.

While grants are always being looked into, he said, the city is going to need a significant investment to be able to replace these water lines in time to hook into the water authority, either in the form of a tax hike or, more likely, the establishment of special improvement districts.

A special improvement district, or SID, is a taxing district set up by the residents of a given area that want to see a specific service improvement made in their area.

These districts were very common in Havre in the 1980s, Mork said, but since then they have all expired and it’s been a long time since one was set up anywhere in the city.

He said the people of Havre don’t seem interested in a blanket increase in taxes, and SIDs are the only other big mechanism he can think of that can solve this problem.

With an SID, typically, property owners agree to pay a relatively small annual amount that is used to pay off a loan taken out to pay for the project.

Mork said if people set up districts to improve the systems in their area, that not only raises money for the updates directly, but also makes it easier for the city to apply for grants.

He said grant organizations look at SIDs as a way to gauge public interest in a project and if they see people in the area setting up these districts they will be more likely to consider these a worthwhile investment.

That could significantly reduce the overall cost.

Given the potential consequences of not doing these projects, he said, he thinks this is an investment people should make, investing in their proverbial vehicle now so they aren’t paying even more in a blowout on the highway.

“People need to put their foot forward in making improvements to their system,” he said.

Effects on road conditions

This impending issue comes amid a growing frustration among Havre citizens regarding the condition of the city’s roads, an issue that Mork said is tied inextricably to the issue of water infrastructure.

Many, on social media and beyond, have been raising concerns about potholes and the general poor state of the city’s streets.

Mork said because so much of the town’s water infrastructure lies beneath streets, and they will need to cut into those streets when and if they start replacing this infrastructure, they’ve been hesitant to invest too many resources into the streets for fear that all of the work will just get torn up again.

“Until then it is a fruitless venture,” he said.

Indeed, he said, a big part of the reason these potholes and rough patches exist in the first place is because of the aging infrastructure below the streets, and putting more and more money into the surface of the road instead of the underlying infrastructure is not a wise investment.

“If the municipal systems of the City of Havre were a car, the car would be, by the average age of the systems, a 1950s vehicle. The engine, in this example the water/wastewater distribution systems, has been repaired time after time while being maintained with spare parts but has exceeded the expected lifespan tenfold,” Mork said. “The exhaust system, in this example the stormwater system, is incomplete and/or rusted away, and has seen numerous advances since originally installed.”

“The seats equate to the road surfaces in this case — yes, the ride may be rough but the time has come to invest in a new car rather than buy new seat covers to attempt to ‘pad the rough ride,’” he added.